Monthly Archives: November 2009

Several pieces from three different sites on the global warming cult: that conspiracy to spread the useful lie of human-caused global warming.

In the first, Shannon Love outlines what “peer reviewed” science actually is. Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) cultists act as if peer reviewed science is without fault or error. Of course, this is wrong. Peer review is a way of making sure that methodological biases are passed on between researchers in some area. I have first-hand experience with this. Of my first two peer-reviewed works, the one that got passed the anonymous and secret editors was the one that played to the methodological bias of the field. It was less interesting, less useful, equally as generalizable, but was in its method what the reviewers were expecting. So it got in.

In the second, Shannon Love notes the poor quality of the models created by the CAGW cult. Again, I have first-hand experience backing this up. After I wrote my master’s thesis on the basis of a computer model, I knew to take every other model with a healthy dose (not a grain, but a glass or gallon) of salt. Even among professional scientists, this is serious, because those scientists rarely have training in software development. Global warming models are buggy, amateurish computer programs that until now has been secret.

Combining these threads, Shannon points out that peer review is not even used for scientific software. Yet again, I have first-hand knowledge backing Shannon up. The two statistical programs I use most often are MPlus and R. Of these, only R’s code is publicly available, peer-reviewed, and largely the result of academic research. MPlus, better marketed and for-profit, is secretive. It is hard to take seriously the conclusions of closed-source software, because it boils down to scientists just trusting their tool-makers.

However, software models is all the CAGW cultists have left. This is because they threw away their raw data. So you have to trust their secret, bugger, amateurish software, as that’s all they have.

Only tangentially related to this scandal, but important to realize the CAGW cult is truly a cult, is this story about a kindergarten teacher leading students in a global warming prayer.

Even Real Climate, which generally defends the University of East Anglia, raises red flags about the conspirator’s desire to delete Freedom of Information-related data and the field’s emphasis on secret and commercial data sources.

After a whitleblower posted secret emails detailing Climate Gate, some have talked about the “divergence problem.” The divergence problem, statistically, is the problem that the latent factor of temperature that is indicated by tree ring data, among other indicators, does not appear to be invariant. That is, it is not indicated equally well by its indicators as time goes on.

Liberals and leftists argue that the Flynn Effect is evidence that there are not heritable and/or racial differnces in general intelligence. The same liberals and leftists simply restate the fact that there is a “divergence problem,” with respect to indocators of temperature, and act as if it is not a big deal.

The reason is simple: global warming is a useful lie. Whether one wants to fight Russia, or merely enact your own puritanical wonderful on everyone else, lowering CO2 emissions is a greaet way to go about it.

Of course, I do not want to say that global warming is on the same bar as racial theorists. I am aware of no organized conspiracy of racial theorists on par with the University of East Anglia to squash dissenting voices. Likewise, the University of East Anglia’s destruction of its original data, combined with its poorly written and non-peer-reviewed computer models, is far more reckless and slipshod than, say, anything Hernstein or Murray ever put out.

The Buffs were able to get the ball back and drive down to the Nebraska 15 yard line with about five minutes left but, once again, the team shot themselves in the foot. This drive is a microcosm of the inadequacies this team displays on a weekly basis:

Play 1 - quick zero yard pass to Simas in bounds while the Buffs are down 14 points. You have to go up field there considering your timeout situation and only five minutes on the clock. At least a play out of bounds. Before that play, the Buffs took their second timeout of the second half, leaving them with only one. The play call of a small flip pass to Simas after the timeout is mind boggling.Â Play 2 – incomplete pass. Now 3rd and 10 from the 15 yard linePlay 3 – delay of game, five yard penalty. Now 3rd and 15 from the 20 yard line.Play 4 – false start, five yard penalty. Now 3rd and 20 from the 25 yard line.Play 5 – pass incomplete. Now 4th and 20 from the 25 yard linePlay 6 – timeout, their second of the drive without gaining a yard since having the ball 1st & 10 and last timeout of the half.Â Play 7 – interception

Today is a very happy day, as my wife’s cousin is visiting us in Omaha before Thanksgiving. Earlier this week was great too, as an old college friend stopped by after taking the train to Omaha. A wonderful week!

As I know, and am close to, numerous nurses who work with high-risk groups and have yet to receive the Pig Flu (H1N1) Vaccine, I would like to know the answer to the following questions

1. What is the correlation between an individual’s contributions to the Obama campaign and his or her probability of having received a Pig Flu vaccine shot?

2. What is the correlation between the average size of individual contributions to the Obama campaign for an organization, and the fraction of that organization’s workforce that have received a Pig Flu vaccine?

Surprising no one, the “evidence” for global warming is fraudulent, the product of organized deception mascerading as science

Hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world’s leading climate scientists over the past 13 years have been stolen by hackers and leaked online, it emerged today.

The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the UK’s University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

Climate change sceptics who have studied the emails allege that they provide “smoking gun” evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind. So far the veracity of the emails has not been confirmed and the scientists involved have declined to comment on the story, which broke on a blog called The Air Vent.

The files, which in total amount to 61MB of data, were first uploaded onto a Russian server, before being widely mirrored across the internet. The emails were accompanied by the anonymous statement: “We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”

Hopefully, the European chattering classes will talk themselves into ignoring the pseudoscience they are selling to their own publics. The struggle against Russian aggression and backwardness is too important to let honesty and science get in the way.

When the Oligarchs (the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the Secretaries of the Treasury Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner) looted our treasury, they did not only transfer wealth from Americans to their pockets. They assisted in a raid against the United States that changed our international position more than any single event since 1941.